Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 27 April 2004
506 Mr. Connolly asked the Minister for Health and Children the number of medical cards withdrawn from medical card holders in County Cavan since 17 May 2002; the number of new medical cards issued since that date; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [11265/04]
View answer507 Mr. Connolly asked the Minister for Health and Children the number of medical cards withdrawn from medical card holders in County Monaghan since 17 May 2002; the number of new medical cards issued since that date; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [11266/04]
View answerI propose to take Questions Nos. 506 and 507 together.
The information requested by the Deputy is set out in tabular form below.
|
Number of medical cards withdrawn since 17 May 2002 |
Number of new medical cards issued since that date |
Number of medical cards current in April 2004 |
|
|
Cavan |
2,928 |
3,143 |
11,985 |
|
Monaghan |
2,702 |
2,750 |
10,760 |
Regular reviews of the GMS list of patients take place in all health board areas. These reviews are necessary to ensure that the patients continue to be eligible for GMS services and to satisfy public accountability obligations on the management of health board medical card databases. The withdrawal of medical cards can be attributed in some measure to the rise in the number of persons in employment and also to the data cleansing exercise which was carried out on medical card databases in 2003. It should be noted that most of these deletions arose from normal medical card review activity.
